Discovering your current brand

As you work to discover your current brand (the one that exists in the minds of your stakeholders right now), you’ll need to prioritize who you wish to involve. Your customers are the obvious choice, but what about:

Consumers
Customers are not always the consumer. A housewife will buy biscuits for her kids, and probably not eat them herself. She is the customer, but not the consumer. The consumer is a special type of ‘purchase influencer’ – and another key stakeholder in the brand.

Purchase ‘influencers’
Around each of your customers it is likely that there are a number of influencers. Consider these examples:

• A ‘family man’ buying a new car, has the wants and needs of his wife and kids to consider. They are purchase influencers.
• A teenager buying a DVD or video game, will consider its ‘acceptability’ to his/her friends, and the risk of it being rejected. The friends are purchase influencers.
• An Office Manager considering a major office equipment purchase has the wants and needs of management and staff to consider. They are purchase influencers.

Employees / management
Employees have a variety of different relationships with the brand, and can be one of the most important stakeholder groups (for all brands, but especially for service and corporate brands).

Strategic partners
Strategic partners may be suppliers, distributors, retailers, technology collaborators, consultants, advisors, etc. How they see your brand has enormous impact on their perspective of the partnership: the opportunities that it presents and the value that it offers to them.

General public
The general public can be a very important stakeholder group for a brand (particularly a corporate brand). This is true for small neighborhood businesses, just as it is for large global corporations. For both it can be equally important to be seen to be making a positive contribution to the community in which they operate.

Investors and potential investors
On many occasions the investors are NOT a significant consideration in the brand management process. Get everything else right and investor perceptions will take care of themselves, because profits and revenues are their main measure.

However, there are a few occasions when investors and potential investors can be the whole focus of a brand management process:

• When the company is preparing to raise finances
• When investor perceptions lag behind reality, and so are limiting the potential for growth of the business
• During company re-organizations, acquisitions, etc, when rapid change makes it essential to manage the perceptions of this group

Brand influencers: professional advisors, media, etc.
These are not your strategic partners, but industry influencers, whose advice and guidance is sought by your stakeholders. The media is an obvious example, relevant to almost all brands, but in some industries (especially in the business-to-business environment) there will be many other influencers.

Identifying the most important stakeholders
On an ongoing basis all your brand stakeholders are important, and need to be incorporated into the brand management process. Collectively they build the value of your brand to your business. However, there will be cases, depending on the current scope and focus of your brand management work, when you will choose to prioritize certain stakeholders and address specific issues that need to be resolved.

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